Tom Brokaw and Gus Russo were desperate

[James DiEugenio]

I am enclosing the Update to my last Gus Russo article here.  I could not add it until I watched the show again.  Amazingly,  a listener to Len Osanic's show had it.  He sent it to Len and Len sent it to me.  And it confirmed what I thought journalist Richard Reeves said about NSAM 263.  Which is probably even more astonishing today than it was then. But this is how desperate NBC, Brokaw and Russo, the lead reporter were. Really kind of sickening.  (I am glad we shoed Marina Oswald getting into it with Brokaw in our film.)

UPDATE:

One of the listeners to Black Op Radio surfaced a video copy of the 2013 NBC special hosted by Tom Brokaw called Where were You? The Day JFK Died.

It was very difficult to locate as I could not find a copy in any library in America, or for sale on Amazon or Ebay. It is almost like NBC wanted it to disappear.

The reason I wanted to see it again was simple. I had a distinct memory about one of the interview subjects, the late journalist Richard Reeves. Reeves wrote a book about John Kennedy called President Kennedy: Profile of Power. The book had a major publisher, Simon and Schuster, and it was published in 1993. I could not finish the book since, as Donald Gibson said to me, “It is a piece of junk.” And there is no doubt it was and is. With what Reeves left out, one could have written another, and much better, book.

Now, why did Brokaw and his reporter Gus Russo want to interview Reeves, and not say, Arthur Schlesinger or Ted Sorenson or Pierre Salinger. These men all knew Kennedy and wrote much better books about the man. This is the likely reason. John Newman’s milestone book, JFK and Vietnam had been integrated into Oliver Stone’s film JFK. And this aspect, Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Indochina, had a huge impact on a national scale. The message being: If Kennedy had not been killed, there would have been no Vietnam War.

Well, Reeves was there to say the opposite. As the reader can see in the main article above Reeves said that Kennedy got America into Vietnam. How he kept a straight face saying this is remarkable. But on the show he added something to this. Apparently wishing to counteract the import of the October 1963 NSAM 263, in which Kennedy ordered the withdrawal of a thousand troops, Reeves said something that is truly shocking. He said that this order only referred to support staff like cooks etc. This is why I wanted to see the program again. Because I needed to know if I recalled correctly. I did. The quote is utterly false on its face.

For example when Kennedy first instructed Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to brief the press on the order, he told him to tell them it would include helicopter pilots also. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 415) If that is not enough, here is a link to NSAM 263. Does military personnel mean cooks to anyone? Finally, one can read the entire McNamara-Taylor report and not find anything close to what Reeves said on the program.

This was really one of the all-time lows ever for the MSM and the JFK case. Which is saying something. But what does one expect from a combination of Russo and Reeves and Brokaw. John Barbour tried to talk to Brokaw where he heard he was producing the program. He told Tom that he had hours of interviews with the late Jim Garrison to show him. Brokaw simply replied, “No Garrison John.”

No Garrison. Instead cooks being withdrawn with NSAM 263 right Tom?